A common method of exchanging personal and/or business contact information from one person to another is through the exchange of physical printed business cards. Often, a given person may give and/or receive tens or even hundreds of printed business cards over the course of a given period of time. Upon receipt of a printed business card, the card recipient often desires to store the data from the card via an electronic contacts application. Unfortunately, storing the data via the electronic contacts application typically requires entry of the data by hand. Similarly, if the recipient already has contact information associated with a received business card, the recipient has no automated means for updating the contact information with new information received on the business card. Electronic card readers have been developed for storing a scanned image of a printed business card, but such readers do not allow for storage of individual typed data fields of a given card, for example, name, telephone number, address, and the like, or metadata that provides information about which of such data fields are included in the card.
In addition, contacts applications users often desire to send contact information to a recipient via an electronic communication method, such as electronic mail, but the contact information must be entered into an electronic mail message by hand or by a copy and paste operation. Such methods are cumbersome and do not provide for a succinct visual presentation of the contact information as is the case with a physical printed business card. According to the vCard standard, electronic business cards may be sent over digital media, but vCards do not carry a graphical visual representation of the contact information as is the case with physical printed business cards. Thus, sending contact information electronically in such a manner does not provide the sender a means for branding himself/herself as is possible with business cards that present unique logos or formatting properties.
It is with respect to these and other considerations that the present invention has been made.